"We need but remember that the city, the metro-polis, means at root a streaming, flowing, thronging mother. We are her children, and she can nourish our imaginations if we nourish hers. So, the magna mater is not the magna culpa. The actual blame for it all — the whole caboodle of downtown and the budget, of illiteracy and rearmament, ethical decay and ecological poison, the cause of the withering of our institutions — government, schools, family, trades and services, publishing and language — is the neglect of the city. And the city can be restored as mother by the child of imagination. Without that child we cannot imagine further our civilization or further our civilization's imagination, so that civilization itself becomes a bad mother, offering no ground or drink to the soul. Of course the individual mother feels a failure. The experience of bad mothering is given with the civilization itself when the education of imagination is neglected."